Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilNuméros18Style and discourse analysis: lon...

Style and discourse analysis: long live the SSADA!

Léa Boichard et Julie Neveux

Texte intégral

1The 61st SAES congress, which took place in Clermont-Ferrand in June 2022, was centered around the notion of “fault lines”, or failles, in French. The workshop of the Société de Stylistique Anglaise (SSA) welcomed papers taking a wide variety of angles and disciplinary approaches to this theme, showing a diversity of research interests that our society and journal have always encouraged. It is to account for this diversity, and also to make explicit room for the increasingly active field of discourse analysis, that our society, following its 2022 general meeting, was renamed Société de Stylistique et d’Analyse des Discours Anglophones (SSADA).

2The 17th issue of our journal, co-edited by Catherine Resche and Mathilde Gaillard and published in April 2023, https://journals.openedition.org/​esa/​4871 was devoted to stylistic studies of specialized discourses. It brought a significant contribution to the field of stylistics in showing 1) how relevant an applied stylistic approach and terminology proved to characterize diverse professional discourses 2) how much the world of academia would benefit from what could (should) become a subfield of its own – the stylistics of specialized milieus.

3The seven articles published in this 18th issue of Etudes de Stylistique Anglaise were all originally presented during the workshop of the 61st SAES congress and their eclecticism is yet another manifestation of our transdisciplinary DNA.

4Indeed, the corpora investigated in this issue range from film studies to press articles, from photography to literature, from student papers to medieval essays. However, all the authors worked from a stylistic/contextualized linguistic/discursive perspective, endeavoring to highlight how specific representational data, occurring at different fault lines, yielded specific meaning. What most of them had to face and analyze is maybe the following paradox: not saying (failing to say), not representing (failing to represent), is a particularly efficient way to invite co-constructed meaning and interpretation. Less might even, in some cases, mean more.

I Using stylistics to teach faultless academic writing

5In this first part, Craig Hamilton draws from his experience as a teacher to propose a method to improve students’ academic writing, particularly when they need to report quotations. He carries on action research and takes 43 third-year students’ papers to investigate the impact of teaching what he calls the quotation sandwich method.

II Fault lines at the syntax/semantics interface

6The second part delves into fault lines occurring at the syntax-semantics interface, first at the nominal level and then at the syntactic level.

7Jean Albrespit looks at the stylistics of collective nouns involving animal grouping in N1 of N2 constructions (e.g. a pack of wolves) and shows how this pattern favours lexical innovation. A diachronic overview and a comparative study with French suggest that this structure is particularly productive in English.

8Marie Dubois-Aumercier explores the semantics of underdeterminacy by comparing the contexts of occurrence of two types of adjectival complementation, with or without a preposition, e.g. happy (with) being me. Although the constructions seem close, their comparative uses signal a different kind of motivation: when complemented by the preposition+gerund clause sequence, happy tends to encode an emotional impact as explicitly triggered by a given event on the speaker, whereas a participial complement conceptualizes the event and the emotional state as implicitly belonging to the same situation.

III Pragmatics and faulty communication

9Ruptures and gaps in communication are the focus of this third part, where the pragmatic perspective and framework adopted by the authors highlight how the relationships between interactants and message might be described as a complex interpretative interplay requiring collaboration.

10First, Paul Larreya distinguishes between different types of presupposition and implicatures induced by the greater or lesser distance between what is said and what is meant. Analyzing French and English examples of implicatures often extracted from press articles, he characterizes the specificity of a stylistic use of implicit utterances as a transgressive use often serving to convey (and impose) new information.

11Then, Virginie Iché takes a pragmatic approach to the study of film conversations; using Reza and Polanski’s 2011 Carnage as a case study, she questions the roles played by conflict and disagreement in communication, both on screen and with the audience. She investigates and compares fault lines in Carnage both at the characters’ and at the recipients’ levels, showing that conflicts on the screen might be used to knit a close relationship with the audience.

IV Interpreting gaps between reality and representation

12Finally, gaps between reality and representation are scrutinized in this last part from an artistic perspective, the fault line between the real world and the frame of the photograph or the blank on the first page of the novel carrying a wealth of potential for interpretation.

13The work of US photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyard (1925-1972), in its most experimental and formal production, is analyzed by Jean-Marc Victor as (dis)playing (with) a core fault line: that which defines the photographic medium per se, the first to be able to keep an instantaneous trace of the past, to really re-present what is now gone. Some recurrent, haunting motifs of Meatyard’s pictures, such as the staging of silent screams, and the reference to other modes of representation, manifest yet another fault line – what photography (deliberately) fails to capture.

14In the last paper, Virginie Passot provides a stylistic analysis of incipits in literary fiction, explaining how the first sentences of novels constitute a fracture, a gap between reality and fiction that holds much power in seducing the reader into the fictional world of the novel. It is precisely in the space that separates the two sides of the breach that literature emerges, and this is especially true of in medias res beginnings.

From fault lines to transmission

15The articles in this issue all tend to conclude that fault lines are zones, spaces, interfaces and gaps that favor the elaboration of meaning; a meaning that is at times fragile and that rests on the co-speaker’s, the reader’s, or the onlooker’s work of interpretation. The interactions between all the participants to an act of communication/representation have been shown to be stimulated in fault lines, be it in terms of stylistics, pragmatics, semantics, syntax or artistic discourse.

16The 62nd SAES congress will be held at the University of Rennes 2 in June 2023 and will be centered around the notion of “Transmission(s)”. Faithful to its tradition, the SSADA workshop will welcome papers reflecting on the notion of "transmission" in language whether from the point of view of style, or of discourse analysis (be it literary, civilisational, media, political, etc.). Style (defined as a system of recurrent markers) will be considered as that by which language, be it literary or non-literary, acts as a transmission – not only of a feeling, but also of a content, a point of view, a context, an attitude, a storytelling.

Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Léa Boichard et Julie Neveux, « Style and discourse analysis: long live the SSADA! »Études de stylistique anglaise [En ligne], 18 | 2023, mis en ligne le 11 mai 2023, consulté le 12 décembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/esa/5165

Haut de page

Auteurs

Léa Boichard

Présidente adjointe de la SSADA,
Université Savoie Mont Blanc, LLSETI (EA 3706) & Centre d’Études Linguistiques (EA 1663)

Articles du même auteur

Julie Neveux

Présidente de la SSADA,
Sorbonne Université, Celiso (Centre de Linguistique en Sorbonne)

Articles du même auteur

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

Le texte et les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés), sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search